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in the story of the family dog. Buffy, a forty- scared, frustrated, lonely. Her anxiety made her 5
pound golden retriever mix we adopted from brittle, easy to anger. But I didn’t feel sympa-
the pound when I was six and my sister was thetic. I felt fear, neglect. I felt resentment.
three, had been smothered with love in her My mother and I started to fight all the 20 section three
youth. Buffy, for whom we took a pet first-aid time. She was retreating from the world, a
class in order to learn how to be responsible slow-motion magic trick. Meanwhile, I was getting
owners, who was the muse for my grade-school louder, angrier, wilder. I experimented with /
poetry exercises (“Buffy is fluffy!”), our sidekick early forms of my own amplification — of self, of
for picnics and outings, on the sidelines for voice, of fury — while my mother’s volume was
soccer games, and the subject most featured in turned down lower and lower, only ever audible Carrie Brownstein
my first roll of film — posing on my baby blan- when she broadcast searing feedback and static;
ket and wearing sunglasses — after I was given broken, tuneless sounds. We vacillated between
a camera for my birthday. Buffy, who followed shouting and silence, the megaphone and the
us around the cul-de-sacs while we engaged mute. We scrapped and scraped. I’d rile her up
in dirt clod fights with the neighbor kids, and until medicine bottles were hurled my way and I
trotted after us while we rode Big Wheels and responded with a piece of pizza. She threatened
eventually bikes. Buffy, who suffered the sting
of the archaic idea that you could punish a dog
by smacking it on the nose with a rolled-up
newspaper and whose tail was run over by
my mother as she backed the car out of the
driveway. And Buffy, turned back into a stray
in her own home on account of the rest of us
surrendering to emptiness, drifting away from
anything we could call familiar, her skin itching
and inflamed, covered with sores and bites, like
tattoos, like skywriting, screaming with red-
ness, as if to say Please, please pet me! But we
didn’t. When we decided to put her down, not
because she was sick but because she was old
and neglected — a remnant of a family we no
longer recognized — my father asked my sister
to do it. My sister was sixteen. She drove the
dog to the vet one day after school by herself.
No one else said good-bye.
The distance and detachment created a Jason LaVeris/Getty Images
loneliness. We couldn’t name the source of it,
but there was a blankness around which we
gathered, one that grew colder and darker, and
seeped into everything we did. I think for my This is an image of Brownstein playing with her
mother it was most pronounced. I would lie in band Sleater-Kinney.
bed at night and hear her on the phone with In what way does this photo depict the
self-transformation she describes in her
my father, who was away for weeks on business narrative?
in Europe or Asia or Australia. She was crying,
Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample. 207
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.

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